“Marcus Tullius Cicero, and Cicero the younger, and Terentia, and Tullia, and Brother Quintus, and Quintus’s Son, to Tiro send greeting.

“Although I miss your able and willing service every moment, still it is not on my own account so much as yours that I am sorry you are not well.  But as your illness has now taken the form of a quartan fever (for so Curius writes), I hope, if you take care of yourself, you will soon be stronger.  Only be sure, if you have any kindness for me, not to trouble yourself about anything else just now, except how to get well as soon as may be.  I am quite aware how much you regret not being with me; but everything will go right if you get well.  I would not have you hurry, or undergo the annoyance of sea-sickness while you are weak, or risk a sea-voyage in winter”.  Then he tells him all the news from Rome; how there had been quite an ovation on his arrival there; how Caesar was (he thought) growing dangerous to the state; and how his own coveted “triumph” was still postponed.  “All this”, he says, “I thought you would like to know”.  Then he concludes:  “Over and over again, I beg you to take care to get well, and to send me a letter whenever you have an opportunity.  Farewell, again and again”.

Tiro got well, and outlived his kind master, who, very soon after this, presented him with his freedom.  It is to him that we are said to be indebted for the preservation and publication of Cicero’s correspondence.  He wrote, also, a biography of him, which Plutarch had seen, and of which he probably made use in his own ‘Life of Cicero’, but which has not come down to us.

There was another of his household for whom Cicero had the same affection.  This was Sositheus, also a slave, but a man, like Tiro, of some considerable education, whom he employed as his reader.  His death affected Cicero quite as the loss of a friend.  Indeed, his anxiety is such, that his Roman dignity is almost ashamed of it.  “I grieve”, he says, “more than I ought for a mere slave”.  Just as one might now apologise for making too much fuss about a favourite dog; for the slave was looked upon in scarcely a higher light in civilised Rome.  They spoke of him in the neuter gender, as a chattel; and it was gravely discussed, in case of danger in a storm at sea, which it would be right first to cast overboard to lighten the ship, a valuable horse or an indifferent slave.  Hortensius, the rival advocate who has been mentioned, a man of more luxurious habits and less kindly spirit than Cicero, who was said to feed the pet lampreys in his stews much better than he did his slaves, and to have shed tears at the death of one of these ugly favourites, would have probably laughed at Cicero’s concern for Sositheus and Tiro.